Percy Bysshe Shelley

The life and times of:

The life of:

Born on 4 August 1792, to a family of seven children, Shelley being the eldest child.

In 1804 Shelley was brutally bullied frequently by his peers, his books ‘Torn from his hands’, and his clothes ‘Tugged and torn’.

These tormenting times may have been the genesis of Shelley’s initial works, predominantly Gothic.

Shelley was expelled from Oxford in March 1811 after publishing a pamphlet named The Necessity of Atheism. This brought him to the attention of the schools figures of authority, and after refusing to either retract the note or maintain an anonymous authorship, was expelled.

When the lamp is shattered When the lamp is shattered,

The light in the dust lies dead;When the cloud is scattered,The rainbow's glory is shed;When the lute is broken,Sweet tones are remembered not;When the lips have spoken,Loved accents are soon forgot.

As music and splendorSurvive not the lamp and the lute,The heart's echoes renderNo song when the spirit is mute:--No song but sad dirges,Like the wind through a ruined cell,Or the mournful surgesThat ring the dead seaman's knell.

When hearts have once mingled,Love first leaves the well-built nest;The weak one is singledTo endure what it once possessed.O Love! who bewailestThe frailty of all things here,Why choose you the frailestFor your cradle, your home, and your bier?

Its passions will rock thee,As the storms rock the ravens on high;Bright reason will mock thee,Like the sun from a wintry sky.From thy nest every rafterWill rot, and thine eagle homeLeave thee naked to laughter,When leaves fall and cold winds come.

Themes

Light, Music, Birds, Weather and natural events, Home, Seasons.

Shelley uses metaphors of both light and music to describe how, when a hearts love is gone, nothing exists that will recapture that once found love. ‘When the lips have spoken, loved accents are soon forgot’.

Though not essentially a stereotypical ‘Love Poem’, this poem documents how love leaves one after it is gone; and the reality that love can leave and as such will leave you ‘Frail’ and ‘Naked’. Shelley ending the poem by bringing the theme of the ‘well-built nest’ again, that the rafters of the home will rot, and leave one open to the elements; that love will dissipate and leave you alone.

The third and fourth stanza focus upon the concept of birds, a classically ‘Free’ being. Love is shown to leave the stronger heart first, whilst the weaker is left to ‘Endure what it once possessed’, giving the impression that whilst love at one time was something to treasure, it becomes something to be cursed.

‘Why choose you the frailest for your cradle, your home and your bier?’

Here, Shelley addresses the reader; would you choose your most frail child to inherit all you own? This view would of course have been acceptable in a contemporary setting, whilst now seems a little ‘barbaric’. In the context of the poem however, it is the fact that the heart is at its lowest, its weakest at the departing of love.

The poem uses a very basic rhyme scheme, of which is used for meter as opposed to any semantic attributes.

Stanza one has an alternating scheme of 6-7 syllables per line, stanza two 6-8, and a similar scheme throughout the remaining stanzas. This remains rigid throughout the poem, apart from the last line of stanza three which contains 9 syllables.

The content of the poem is odd, considering the romantic genre of its author; being a poem of such negative power that is unusual for a romantic writer. However, due to his origin of gothic fiction, (a trait he seemed to have in common with his wife, the author of Frankenstein; The Modern Prometheus, whom Percy wrote the preface for)